A politician's campaign says a lot about how they would govern, and we should listen.
Who seeks to produce an attack ad featuring an estranged mother's opinion on a child who was removed from her custody nearly 50 years ago? We found an example in the Ohio contest for Governor.
The campaign for Vivek Ramaswamy sought out the estranged elderly mother of his opponent in the race and produced an attack ad that was aimed at calling Dr. Amy Acton unstable and deceptive based on childhood events in her life. Events which the historical record would reveal to be sexual abuse at the hands of a stepfather, whom her mother clung to even when officials removed Amy and her brother from the household.
The Ramaswamy campaign has invested significant money and deliberation into the attack ad and stand by it even in the face of substantial backlash from Republicans and others alike. These are conscious, resourced, and intentional decisions that tell us a lot about how Ramaswamy would wield any further power he would gain if he wins this election.
And this is something we should consider in every electoral campaign: how candidates seek power is evidence of how they believe they may use it.
Here, we might deduce that Ramaswamy prefers an unquestioning loyalty in the face of harm and violation. The decisions appear to make it clear that Ramaswamy sides with the abuser and the enabler against the survivor. That predation is a value not just defended but practiced.
If there was any doubt about the intention, then that doubt is washed away as the campaign does not retract the ad when called out on the callousness, but rather they double-down and defend the piece as some crucial revelation about his opponent.
It is revelatory, but not in the scathing fashion in which it may have been intended.
The ad seeks to use the leverage of family dynamics to claim authority over another person's life and to discredit someone based upon harms delivered unto them as a child. It takes the scars of survivorship and attempts to pry them open, to turn vulnerability into a claim of unfitness. It attempts to vilify the act of escape and estrangement from those who enabled harm as suspicious and disloyal.
It is something that far too many of us are familiar with firsthand or as close witness to others in our lives. It is the pressure that drives survivors into silence and those who dare to name their suffering to be disbelieved.
Some of us have seen it before, when the police would arrive and the victim is threatened with arrest. When the claims and bruises are downplayed and ignored. When a family doesn't know how to deal with the harm and instead pretends it isn't real.
As a tactic for a political campaign, the idea of who this would appeal to is nearly as disturbing as the ad itself. The vicarious violation of private pain is something repulsive to those of us with unfortunate familiarity with these traumatic family dramas.
I am one such person.
I have felt my life threatened under the literal weight of my abuser, and under the heat of a pan of boiling grease, held in anger above me. I know what it means to look at a wall and remember which holes were made by a head, a hand, or a foot.
I know now, as I always suspected, that if I pursue a run for a major elected office, these things may be weaponized to attack me. My experience differs significantly in time, place, and nature from Dr. Acton's. But I am bolstered by her courage and accomplishments. And I recognize a simple truth about the role of such personal trauma in public life: my scars are mine, and you don't get to use them against me.
A campaign controls considerable money, staff, and communications means. They make decisions about what to amplify, what to attack, and what values they present with their campaign efforts — explicitly or implied. Those decisions tell us about their relationship with truth, vulnerability, dissent, and restraint.
When a campaign treats a survivor's pain as expendable, we should ask how it will treat a constituent who needs help, challenges its authority, or has no platform from which to answer back. Winning office expands power. It makes someone more of who they are. It does not supply the restraint the campaign declined to practice.
Stewardship requires us to hold candidates accountable for how they seek power. We cannot demand dignity in governance while excusing its deliberate violation by the candidates we support.
The abuse Dr. Acton suffered is evidence of what was done to her and her resilience to not let it define her. Ramaswamy's campaign is evidence of what he has chosen to embrace. We should know which of those calls a candidate's fitness into question.